Barry Threw

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Barry Threw - Gray Area Executive Director

Barry Threw cultivates forward-looking, impactful, boundary-blurring projects integrating culture and technology. He drifts fluidly between roles, collaborating as an executive, curator, technologist, designer, community organizer, cultural producer, and strategist. His previous leadership positions have generated innovative & influential platforms, products, teams, and businesses spanning art, music, internet, built environment, and experiential & immersive media. He is convinced that integral approaches combining art, technology, and the humanities are necessary for economic, social, and ecological regeneration.

He is currently the Executive Director of Gray Area — a San Francisco non-profit institution focused on creative action for social transformation through public events, incubation, and education. He is also a founding partner with Fabricatorz — a distributed technology studio for cultural projects with nodes in Hong Kong, St. Louis, and Berlin. He advises institutions, corporations, and organizations globally.

Josette Melchor

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Josette Melchor - Executive Director and Founder, Gray Area

Josette Melchor is the Executive Director and Founder of Gray Area Foundation For The Arts, a leading San Francisco non-profit dedicated to applying digital art and technology to create positive social impact.

As a community organizer, she has developed large-scale festivals of locative media addressing urban community issues such as Urban Prototyping, City Centered, and Creative Currency. She is also credited with producing Summer of Smart, a first-of-its-kind, four-month, city-wide initiative focused on the role of technology in the civic realm.

An early social entrepreneur, she started her first art gallery and studio program at the age of 19 by self-funding creative projects through her work in the technology industry.

As a curator, she led the development and launch of Seaquence, an internationally-acclaimed web-based digital music project and product of Gray Area’s artist-in-research program for creative technologists. She has also worked with notable designers and interdisciplinary research centers including: MIT Senseable City Lab, Institute of Computer Sound and Technology, Stamen Design, Code for America; artists C.E.B Reas, Robert Hodgin, Aaron Koblin, Camille Utterback, and many more.

She has spoken at DLD, PICNIC, TEDx Silicon Valley, Art Center College of Design, and Stanford.

She is also on the board of the SOMArts Cultural Center and on the Advisory Board of the Burning Man Project.

In 2012, Fast Company highlighted Josette Melchor’s work as part of, Change Generation, a series on innovative social entrepreneurs.

Seabrook Gubbins

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Seabrook Gubbins - Production Manager

Sprouted from the woods in Canada, Seabrook Gubbins has overseen the planting of over 5 Million trees over the past 10 years. Through his work in the silviculture industry he has honed his skills in fabrication and production. This conservationist path has led him to travel the world and contribute to several humanitarian and environmental causes. An entrepreneur at heart, he owns and operates a food truck and catering business called Fuki. He believes in the power of community and is helping to activate Gray Area’s new theater in the Mission. Seabrook is the backbone of the Gray Area facility, providing artists and producers a professional experience during any and all of Gray Area’s events.

Karen Gaskill

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Karen Gaskill - Creative Director

Karen is an independent contemporary-art and media-art director and curator, with 15 years experience of working in the UK and internationally with creative venues and initiatives, galleries, arts organisations and academic institutions, festivals and commissioning bodies, across the mediums of art, science, technology and innovation.

Until recently, she was also Head of Innovation at the Crafts Council, UK, running a programme she established for the organisation to profile and support cross-platform innovation across the areas of visual arts, science, medicine, technology, architecture, and design. Prior to this she was Head of Exhibitions for the Crafts Council, UK. She was previously external examiner at the University of Plymouth, UK in 3D Design, and external examiner for Liverpool John Moores University, UK, Digital Media International Programme, Malaysia, 2012-2015. Previously she has held academic posts at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, as a Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Photography and Curatorial Studies, and at the University of Huddersfield, UK, as a Lecturer in Fine Art Media.

She was the founder, co-director and curator of Interval from 2005-2009, an arts organisation based in Manchester, UK, which provided a critical forum and exhibition platform for emergent to mid career artists working with technology.

Vance Galloway

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Vance Galloway - Technical Director

Vance Galloway is a media technician and musician based in Seattle, Washington. From running live sound for seminal clubs such as DC's 9:30 Club and New York's Knitting Factory, to enabling Hollywood studios transition to non-linear audio editing, and helping design the world's first DVD authoring system, Galloway has been at the forefront of technological advances in the arts since the early 1990s.

Naut Humon

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Naut Humon - Founder and Artistic Director, Recombinant Media Labs

Naut Humon has been the Director of International Creative Operations for the RML CineChamber, Asphodel Records and AV curator for select portions of the annual ARS Electronica Festival in Austria where he also acted as the main American coordinator for their Prix Ars Digital Music and Sound Art jury category for a full decade. Recombinant Media Labs (RML) emerged from Humon’s lifetime of performance exploration and cross media cooperations.

By the eighties, Naut Humon and his constituency had built up the warehouse known as the Compound where the experimental group Rhythm and Noise was spawned, initiating many of the core elements that led to forming the globally distributed Asphodel recording label which fostered projects ranging from DVD chamber orchestra renditions of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (with Lou himself playing with the group Zeitkratzer) and the eminently compelling CDs of Mix Master Mike, Diamanda Galas, Rhythm and Sound, Tipsy, Iannis Xenakis, Christian Marclay, John Cage and Maryanne Amacher amongst many others.

Within this structure, the RML consolidation was substantiated as a culturally coherent enterprise, hosting a vast range of visual artists, musicians, engineers, designers, curators, organizers, technologists, educators and theorists from around the world.

Biosphere

Artist Bio

Projects

Geir Jenssen Biosphere

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Biosphere

Taking cues from his outpost near the world's Arctic Circle, Norwegian musician Biosphere has sculpted a body of ambient works as iconoclastic as the remote midnight sun. Geir Jenssen has painted his tonal impressions around the natural phenomena of clouds, glaciers, fjords and forests to forge a somnambulant music that also embraces a sine wave wilderness of slow synthetic pulses or hazy orchestral sources.

Elsewhere, Anywhere / People are Friends

Egbert Mittlestadt: Visuals, Biosphere: Sound

Opening with the weightless dreamful drift of ”Elsewhere Anywhere", Egbert Mittelstadt reveals a Tokyo subway interior where the passengers are captured in a catatonic still life as their frozen images float quietly around a discerning CineChamber Station. Trapped on a haunted metro train to nowhere are the animated apparitions that emerge out of these photographic figures which for brief moments re-imagine the former preoccupation and lost voices of these restless commuter "ghosts".  The spectral twilight audio commentary from Biosphere's Geir Jenssen suggest that these "People are Friends" - activated spirit’s of a human presence long since suspended.

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Path Leading to The High Grass

Egbert Mittlestadt: Visuals, Biosphere: Sound

The mercurial widescreen sonic cinematic syntax of Biosphere & Egbert Mittelstädt has graced the CineChamber screens for many seasons now after their live milestone residencies in 2007. Their timeless program that remains is a signature memory capsule that introduces RML's surround canvas in the most spatially sublime sector of the Recombinant archives.

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Shika

Egbert Mittlestadt: Visuals, Biosphere: Sound

The mercurial widescreen sonic cinematic syntax of Biosphere & Egbert Mittelstädt has graced the CineChamber screens for many seasons now after their live milestone residencies in 2007. Their timeless program that remains is a signature memory capsule that introduces RML's surround canvas in the most spatially sublime sector of the Recombinant archives.

Christian Fennesz

Artist Bio

Christian Fennesz

Using a filtered and treated electric guitar as the starting point for his lush soundscapes, Fennesz has created a personal and groundbreaking discourse throughout his career. Perhaps sculpting the last truly unique vision for the guitar, his luminant compositions are anything but sterile experiments. Fennesz’s world of sound unfolds and resembles sensitive, telescopic recordings of rainforest insect life or natural atmospheric occurrences, an inherent naturalism permeating each piece. In addition to his prolific output as a solo artist, and his ongoing investigation of the limits of noise, automatic composition, field music or contemporary classical, Fennesz is also a frequent collaborator with other luminaries of the scene. These include artists such as Alva Noto, Oren Ambarchi, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Keith Rowe, Peter Rehberg, David Sylvian, and Jim O’Rourke.

http://www.fennesz.com/

Naut Humon

Artist Bio

Project

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XYNAXIS

Naut Humon

Naut Humon is the founder and artistic director of Recombinant Media Labs, and during the last decades was curating AV content for Asphodel Records in New York and SF and for select portions of the annual ARS Electronica Festival in Austria where he also helped coordinate their Digital Music category for ten years. Having performed in the past with the avant-garde music group Rhythm & Noise, he later formed the Surround Traffic Control network; the aural optic incubator that gave birth to today's Cinechamber apparatus.

Xynaxis

One of Xenakis’s first “polytope” multimedia pieces “Persepolis” was chosen for re-interpretation with customized remixes that the composer was aware was about to be released by Asphodel Records in 2001 when he passed away. The interlacing of the remix pieces by various composers draws largely from the original work, emphasizing its noisy sonorities and overlapping waves of intensity. Naut Humon who curated the customized re-workings applied those remix sources with other outside electronics from Frankenstein Symphony etc. for this dedication tribute remix to the future memory of Iannis Xenakis.

Scott Arford

Artist Bio

Project

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Scott Arford STATIC ROOMS

Scott Arford

SCOTT ARFORD (b. 1967) has been active in the Bay Area's underground music and art scene since 1995. His work constantly strives to create an undeniable ecstatic moment, where sound, image and environment merge into a singular experience. His Static Room and TV­IV projects create intense flickering static environments using images to create sound and sounds to create images. Works created for Naut Humon's Cinechamber expand these projects into multi­channel video and sound installations. His Infrasound collaboration with Randy Yau, activates architectural space with sound, literally causing buildings to shake and vibrate.

Arford has shown work globally including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Sounding Festivals in Guangzhou, China and Taipei, Taiwan, Liquid Architecture in Melbourne, Australia, Sonic Light in Amsterdam, and the Center for Contemporary Arts in Kitakyushu, Japan. His awards include an Honorable Mention in the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica.

Arford received a Bachelor of Architecture from the College of Architecture and Design at Kansas State University in 1991. He currently works at EHDD where he just competed a 14 story campus building for City College in downtown San Francisco.

http://www.7hz.org
http://www.23five.org/archives/scottarford.html
http://soundcloud.com/scott­3­3
http://www.23five.org/infrasound/

Static Room

The RML Static Room modules are segments from Scott's ongoing series of performance & exhibitions, which with the palpitating chromatic moiré patterns from TV static and flawed connections, omit all representational images and cease to portray a linearly composed narrative event. Clamorous tones and hallucinatory color fields break down into vibrating sheets of interlaced fluttering and tumultuous shredding crackling luminosities that make it possible to hear the buzzing images and see the flickering sounds.